I’ve been a premium subscriber to Evernote since September of 2011, but I never really got the hang of it. I used import folders, so everything I did was in there, but organizing it and quickly finding what I was looking for — I never managed that. This year, about the time I was supposed to renew, it stopped syncing properly. The installation on my work computer, and on my Android phone, worked fine, as far as I could tell. But the one at home — the one I do all my work on — nope. The sync kept failing. After a week or two of messing with it, I finally contacted Customer Service and after a few exchanges back and forth they told me it was, apparently, a bug of some kind and hopefully it would be fixed in a subsequent release.

I don’t usually feel the need to share site stats. Hit counters are so easily manipulated as to make them pretty much useless. However, in this case, I thought I’d make an exception. This graphic shows the activity for the Projects sub-domain since the site was reorganized and redesigned. The stats program adjusts the numbers for search engines, spiders and bots — they aren’t included.

There’s nothing really impressive here. In the overall scheme of things, the Projects site is just another small fish in a big pond. Amazon.com has more users logged in at any given moment than we do in an entire month, and I think the site has an Alexa rank of 5 million something and an estimated worth of about $500 — which doesn’t even begin to reflect the work that’s gone into it. But that’s not the point.

This can be an expensive hobby, so I take advantage of free stuff whenever possible. OpenOffice and FastStone come immediately to mind. And while that doesn’t mean I never pay for anything, it does mean I take full advantage of free trials and make *sure* it’s going to do what I want it to do before I shell out any cash. This is one reason I’ve never used RootsMagic or The (now defunct) Master Genealogist. Most of the functionality I want to use is disabled in the free version of RootsMagic, so there’s no way to test it (and I just tried it again recently). As for TMG, with its hefty price tag, I wasn’t going to pay for it if I couldn’t figure out how to use it. And I couldn’t.

I continue to struggle with organization. For one thing, I can’t seem to find a system that “does . . . [Yes! There’s more!]